Summary: The wide spread occurrence of natural disasters – landslides, ground instability, floods and so on – that in the last period injured our country, if on one side are obviously linked with the country’s morphology, geology and soils characters, on the other side they are doubtless tied up to the lack of a planned land use management, and, briefly, to the lack of a real long term forest policy in Italy. Moreover in the last century, the social fabric changes and the rural marginal areas abandonment would it make necessary a strong overall land policy in order to effectively safeguard the mountain and hilly territories. With respect to forestry, in order to cope the frequent land disasters often originated by improper land uses, in the last century several nationwide reforestation programs were adopted and resulted in broad plantation campaigns. Those reforestation works were hereafter criticized for the planting techniques and the tree species adopted, but doubtless they changed and shaped many landscapes and essentially contributed to maintain the soil stability in many regions of Italy. Although the reforestation activity is nowadays almost passed away for the high cost of interventions, yet the water geological disorder and the desertification risks would make it compulsory an upswing of forest coverage enhancement by reforestation activities in several sensitive territories. This paper briefly analyzes the last century reforestation activities, underlines the necessity of focused actions and proposes some addresses to carry on the land and slopes safeguard interventions. These activities would be carried on considering the availability of recently abandoned estates, to cope the degradation of slopes. Another urgency to deal with is due to the abandonment of reforested lands. The majority of the forest trees plantations made in the last century have been left to their destiny without any cultivation after planting. No thinning were made in
almost any case, leaving the wood to an high density growth. The current structure of those plantation is often too dense and unbalanced with regards to both stability and ecological efficiency. Such a situation, widespread all over the country, frequently drive to
local disasters, as crashes, tree death, downfalls, wildfires and so on, with consequent failure of soil protection capabilities of woods, landscape value deterioration, loss of wood material. This all is due to the lack of long term forest policy at the national level. Consequently it is compulsory to develop a planned action in order to foster the renaturalisation of old plantation, carried out with specific programs and funding. Those intervention are generally attributed to be costly and without financial benefits. On the other side we must consider the whole economic convenience of landscape recovery, the slope safeguard and, last but not least, the growing interest on biomasses use no less than the opportunity of technological valorization of small log by wood industries.